The Social Pulse, is a new social media hub on Reuters.com which is designed to show you the most talked about news, companies and influencers across the Web. The technical magic behind content discovery is powered by Percolate, an up and coming start up which turns brands in to curators. The Top 50 CEO’s based on their Klout score is also present which is interesting in itself because Klout as we’ve seen before, only ranks on social activity, so the CEO’s that are not online savvy but perhaps more influential will be overlooked. Eg Is Pete Cashmore really more influential than Richard Branson? One to watch to see how it develops further.

Following Facebook’s IPO announcement it was inevitable that commentators would start looking for potential competitors to the behemoth. After being largely ignored for the first months of its existence, it’s now being rightly lauded as one of the hot social properties in 2012, even though the site remains invitation only.

Just six months ago, Pinterest had only 0.17% of the referral traffic. Now it’s leagues ahead of Google+, MySpace, Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn. In fact, it’s practically tied with Twitter and Google, which have 3.61% and 3.62% respectively. Incredible growth. We’ll be reporting much more on Pinterest, documenting its rise to fame. You can follow me on Pinteresthere.

The Council of Europe has the challenge of defending and maintaining its fundamental principles in this new media world. While pursuing its efforts in “traditional” media and their role in the democratic process, the Steering Committee on Media and New Communication Services (CDMC) is also working on freedom of expression in the complex context of the new communications services. Something I don’t think anyone has really cracked just yet. How can you police the public internet and are they as a governing body as relevant anymore? Evolve or die has never been as important.

An interesting debate was stirred up by this piece by The Telegraph where “young people are flooded with Facebook friends but have few they would actually turn to in a crisis.”

The poll by Macmillan Cancer Support found that the average young adult has 237 Facebook friends, but only two they could turn to for real support. Another case of realising that it’s not all about chasing the number of friends you have, it’s the quality of those connections that matters most.

Alex Rainert, the Head of Product for Foursquare confirms they are working on it. “Part of the hold up has been technical restraints, and some of it has been design,” says Rainert. He says Radar is just the beginning of Foursquare’s auto checkin initiative.

Radar is a Foursquare feature that launched a few months ago. It sends notifications whenever a user walks near a venue with a deal and they are working to broaden that technology to the entire check-in process. Eventually, Foursquare will ask you if you want to check in somewhere rather than making the user remember on his or her own. Importantly, users will never be forced to automatically check in on Foursquare but the process promises to become a lot more intuitive and simpler.

“Pretty much everything tripled.” said Product VP Jim Patterson after releasing their numbers for 2011 in this infographic.

Total users increased from 1.6 million to 4 million (2.5X growth), and employees went from 80 to 250. 200,000 companies globally are using Yammer, including 85 percent of the Fortune 500. They are currently in the process of raising a large $40 million round to continue to grow at an incredible rate.